I haven't done much planetary sketching (my sum total of experience being 2 or 3 Mars sketches), but here's my first go at Saturn.

Seeing was good, but not excellent. 385X was never sharp, 325X was sharp perhaps 10% of the time, and 235X was sharp perhaps 75%. I'm a fan of image scale, and so used 325X for the bulk of the work with 235X also used.

Tethys, which appears just off the rings, was quite difficult, even though it is intrinsically brighter than Dione (a bit farther off on the same side), which was easy. Rhea appears on the other side of Saturn. Mimas was between Tethys and Dione, but was not seen on this occasion.

I'm not a huge fan of colored filters, but I did try out a red (25A), which was too dark, and a yellow (K2), which increased the contrast of the banding a miniscule amount but made Tethys much easier to pick out.

I think that your first observation is outstanding as you have captured much detail over the globe and have drawn the approximate width of the rings (things easily missed on an initial observation). You should be very proud of this observation.

I have taken the liberty to play with your observation in Photoshop. I darkened the backgrounds, adjusted levels, and filled in spots of the drawing. I hope that you like it.

Wow, inverting the background really does bring out the shading on the disk better. I tried that with my first Mars sketch about 18 months ago, but could never get the right "softness" to the planet's edge after the invert. The crispness doesn't seem nearly as out of place with Saturn, though, where the composition already has some very hard edges around the ring system.

Nice first attempt at Saturn. Nice to see the rings open up again. I'll have to take a look again soon.

You seemed to have gone through a similar progression with the solar system as I did. My very first serious pastel sketches were actually of Mars [2003 ~ 2005] before that strange abstract of a solar prominence I did [seen Oct 14~16 2006 in Spaceweather.com's front page.]

It was a long time between that Mars to Solar sketch progression. Then I was doing only the sun for two years straight until I rediscovered the moon here in CN.

Carlos imparted some good refinements here too with Photoshop. I have never yet sketched in black/grey graphite on white paper, then invert the image. I know it is working in negative image and I would find it dyslexic for me. Or I guess it becomes an exercise for some to learn from.

Did you mention the size of your sketch? I cannot remember if you stated ever working to a larger format other than the 9" X 12" Art again tablets. I know it is not for some as they may find it an overwhelming commitment to do a 19" X 25" but working in large format art will allow a tremendous amount of more detail. Or they become large artworks to eventually display; another consideration I ponder all too often now.

Encouraged by Carlos' and Bill's results I decided to have another go at processing this one. (Geez, I feel like a real imager now. I might even call the original my "data set". )

Anyway, the planet's disk was fairly easy, but the rings were a real bear. After finally getting the rings into shape I squashed the disk at bit at the poles to more faithfully protray what I viewed (the "data set" was sketeched within a coin outline, which is of course more round than Saturn).